Saturday, November 17, 2012

Master of the Game

Robert Zemeckis’ Flight
might almost be a disguised extension of the Tiger Woods story. As I understand
it (or maybe this is just how I wish to understand it), Woods flew for years
within an ever-expanding network of sexual landing strips, kept aloft by enough
text messages to maintain the average high school population, presumably hidden
from tabloid eyes only by significant resourcefulness and ingenuity, and all of
this (and this is the key point of interpretation, I guess), far from limiting
his professional capacities, was key to fuelling it, to keeping him soaring in
the proverbial zone. Since it all crashed, and he was forced into contrition
and humility, and (as far as we know) into re-launching himself as a good boy,
he’s never been the same again. In a different world, we’d be as fascinated by
the public/private alchemy as by the golf itself.

Flight

In Flight, Denzel
Washington plays Whip Whitaker, a charismatic commercial airline pilot who
drinks, takes drugs, and parties hard, and that’s just on the days he’s flying
the plane. On a short-haul flight to Atlanta, he mixes vodka into his orange
juice (executed, in a nice touch, behind his back while he’s standing in front
of the cabin to reassure the passengers about the turbulence they just passed
through) and then passes out, leaving it to the co-pilot. The plane experiences
a catastrophic mechanical failure, and seems doomed, but Whitaker – despite the
booze or because of it; who knows how things come together at such moments? –
manages to control the descent by flying the plane upside-down, eventually
bringing it down in a field with just six lives lost. Presumably he’s a hero,
except that a toxicology report soon reveals the shape he was in. How should
the moral calculus play out, when a pilot may have accomplished a miracle only
because of his contempt for his most basic obligations?

This is a compelling psychological core for the film, and
Washington is well up to the task, fully inhabiting the high and low extremes
of Whitaker’s existence, from the kind of situation-defining charisma that
hypnotizes most mere mortals caught in its orbit, to raw, un-pretty, fleshy,
bottom of the barrel self-destruction. Whitaker isn’t like Nicolas Cage’s
character in Leaving Las Vegas,
committed to self-destruction – he thrives on what he’s getting away with, on
placing himself as close as possible to going over the edge, and then somehow defying
genetic gravity to pull himself upright. At one point in the film, when he’s
been sober for a series of days and supposedly committed to staying that way,
he opens a hotel minibar and marvels at the contents. We marvel at them too –
it’s like a gorgeous city of light. Absolutely no one in the audience will be
surprised by how that episode turns out.

Life
experiences

At a couple of points, the movie mulls over the meaning of
such extreme life experiences, grouping Whitaker with a drug addict and a
terminal cancer patient as prisms for belief in God. At times like these, and
in an unusually frank opening section for a mainstream release nowadays, the
film feels like it might take us somewhere dark and unchartered, into a
spiritual turbulence leaving us no way out. Unfortunately though, much of what
surrounds these aspects of the film is conventional and overly tidy, in exactly
the same way you encounter in one Hollywood film after another. These familiar
sins include, for instance, an incoherent approach to the timeline – it’s
impossible to know at times whether events are separated by a day or by several
months or more – and by a lack of interest in the institutional complexity of
such a major event: in real life, someone in Whitaker’s situation would surely
spend hours and days being grilled in endless detail, but in Flight, the debriefing seems to last an
aggregate of about five minutes. Likewise, the climactic public hearing on the
crash investigation is structured more like a bite-sized 60 Minutes segment than an actual meeting.

As I say, there’s nothing unusual about these
simplifications, and I know they’re necessary in keeping the story to a
manageable length. But that’s only because the story, ultimately, turns out to
be another tale of redemption, steering us to one of the most over-visited of
cinematic hubs. It’s not the most galvanizing of arrival points, and certainly
doesn’t do much justice to the film’s strengths.

For another example, the same weekend I saw the film, the
media was preoccupied with the resignation of the admired C.I.A. chief, David
Petraeus, after it came out he’d been having an affair with his biographer. It
doesn’t sound like Obama really wanted to accept the resignation, and the
reporting and commentary on the matter seemed coloured by several shades of
disappointment. The reason most often put forward for the necessity of his
stepping down was the position’s heightened sensitivity and susceptibility to
blackmail and the like, but it’s hard to see how that could be a practical
issue for something already out in the open. For most of those involved,
perhaps including Petraeus himself, I’m not sure there was much more to it
than, well, that’s just what you have to do. Meanwhile, The New York Times published a piece on Allen Dulles, possibly “the greatest intelligence officer who ever lived,” who led the CIA in the
1950’s despite having had dozens of affairs. “By today’s standards,” concludes
the writer, “this master spy would not have been allowed even to join the
C.I.A., much less lead it.” Similar observations have been made, of course,
about some of the greatest presidents, including FDR and JFK. But surely no one
wishes our current “standards” could be retrospectively applied to strike them
from the history books. (By the way, I believe golf TV ratings have generally
plummeted since Tiger stopped winning).

Teachable moments

No doubt, the Petraeus
incident is only a heightened example of how human interaction is controlled
and conditioned by more conventions than we can keep track of – some of them
still incrementally useful, others just dance steps we keep on repeating even
though the original accompanying music died out long ago. But when these
conventions require a sacrifice that no one seems entirely sure is for the
greater good of things, it ought to provide a teachable moment, especially in
the immediate wake of an election generally viewed as a positive step for
liberal social values. Maybe Hollywood is just too morally compromised a
community ever to make films that provide much of a reference point for such elevated
conversations, but Flight is at least
halfway there, and that’s not too bad.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).